The Duelling Elves of Valon

In the recent The Princess Bride episode I talked at some length about RPG combat systems with reference to three systems: Paul Kidd’s Lace & Steel, Jacob Norwood’s The Riddle of Steel, and Luke Crane’s Burning Wheel. Since then I discovered something else in my RPG collection: The Duel, published by Alternative Armies in 1992.

Alternative Armies is still alive with a complete line around the “Empire of Valon”. The Duel has been renamed En Garde, clearly the same properly as The Duel since the cover with a female officer (a lancer?) in red disarming her opponent (a dragoon?) in blue is an identical scene.

(I have to say in both versions I don’t quite see how she got the disarm to work and I prefer the poses in the original)

This is of course not the same as GDW’s En Garde! from 1975 (see below). It’s a one-on-one wargame and I guess the intention was for players to paint their minis of their champions and then use the duelling rules to advance their duellist’s honour, which goes up for participating in duels, duelling to the death, decent strikes, etc.

The world is a faux Napoleonic empire before the “Elvish Civil War” just before “Flintloque” which I think is a more traditional wargame. In this particular game you align yourself with either the Empress or the Crown Prince, but all of the moving parts are dedicated to duelling, which works like this:

  • In each round you roll a load of d6 secretly and then play them out during the round as slashes, feints, ripostes and other moves
  • There’s an initiative roll for who goes first each round
  • Skills and weapons adjust the starting number of dice you get
  • Wounds are taken directly off the pool of dice, meaning that there’s a pretty acute death spiral here

I said in the podcast that one of the things Lace & Steel does is to frame the duel without taking the players away from the fiction too much; but at the same time the card game does require player skill as much as character ability. It’s the same here, I think. This book is about 48 pages long including ads, but it does make reference to a forthcoming RPG called Empire although that’s absent from the modern site.

Finally the book’s notable for crediting “the Welsh posse, the Frimley posse, hordes of convention goers” which, coupled with the use of Optima in layout makes this feel like an indie effort.

Anyway, here are some pics of grumpy elves in 19c uniforms (illustrator is Peter Knifton):

Given the name similarity I went back to my copy of En Garde!, although it’s early 17c historical rather than pseudo early 19c fantasy. This is a “semi historical game simulation” set in the 17th or 18th centuries, first published in 1975. It’s annoyingly patriarchal and heteronormative but that’s to be expected of the era of game design and the fiction it’s based on; the only problem with that is how some people might react to it today, and therefore overlook the actual game underneath which can be easily brought up to date with setting.

Structurally it has a surprising amount in common with The Duel with a focus on duelling etiquette, military rank and honour and even some of the furious terms used in the later publication. Where it deviates is the actual fence game; in this version, instead of playing moment to moment with combatants adapting, instead you write down a sequence of twelve steps in tempo, and then both reveal them. So just like Lace & Steel and The Duel and Burning Wheel it’s a mini game in itself that takes some learning to apply smoothly. But unlike the first two it expects you to plan many moves in advance. The simplicity of each individual beat means this is not too hard to keep track of (unlike Burning Wheel) and there are optional moves that happen as the sequence is executed, which means characters will respond. So I’m torn on whether this is a good, interesting mini game that parodies a certain kind of fencing, or a hot mess.

Anyway, if you haven’t listened to the episode yet this is something else to bear in mind. Thoughts and comments always welcome.